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‘The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end.” So runs the opening line of Shakespeare’s dedication to his patron Henry Wriothesley (pronounced Rizley), the third Earl of Southampton, in the first pamphlet edition of his narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece (1594). Mere formality or overt ardency? From such little nuggets mighty (or fair to middling) dramas might grow.

In choosing to speculate on the relationship between HW (who could, conceivably, be the “Mr WH” to whom the sonnets are devoted) and WS, Nick Dear has given himself considerable (possibly excessive) licence to invent. Dedication is a triple‑pronged attempt to fathom what might have gone on.

Earthy: Tom McKay as WillCredit:
Luke MacGregor

Each storyline provides a variant spin on initial encounters and subsequent developments: ranging from some detachment (even class friction) between the wealthy aristo and the self-made man, to swift, fully reciprocated devotion.

Dear has clearly done his research and, in plausible-sounding modern dialogue, combines the fictional with the factual. Did Shakespeare go to Italy? Who knows? Did Southampton marry one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting? Yes. The evening gives a handy potted history of the youth’s fluctuating fortunes, including his high-risk consorting with the Earl of Essex prior to the 1601 rebellion.

Dressed to kill: Tom Rhys Harries and Tom McKayCredit:
Luke MacGregor

More problematic is the suggestion that the Bard was summoned before the Lord Chief Justice in the wake of that plot. Aside from the bombastic opening – shafts of light, the amplified voice of unseen authority, cowled figures chanting Latin – it plots a course towards ugly denial: “We never met.”

Shakespeare the poet, the lover. Fine. The Judas figure? I found that harder to credit than all the sexual relations, lustily evoked. As for the idea that Will would have crept into the Tower to consort with his former beau while disguised as a woman – Shakespeare in Drag, if you will – come on, my Dear.

Still, finely directed by Sam Hodges, the performances – set amid Alex Lowde’s compact, rotating, occultish vision of the Star Chamber – deserve poetic paeans in their own right. A black-clad Tom McKay gives Will an earthy, Stratford-born practicality of disposition. Tom Rhys Harries’s Harry – in contrasting white doublet-and-hose – is the sort of blond Adonis (the real Earl was auburn-haired) that Venus herself would have gone mad for. He is by turns brattish, narcissistic, impassioned, touchingly forlorn; and he looks swell in a dress, too, dancing the canario for good measure.